Cross of Iron
by HobbsTunaSammi
Summary: "The end has come and gone, yet mankind knows no peace." Crossover of Evangelion, Eclipse Phase, Attack on Titan, Laundry Files and some others with pretension of hardish SF and cosmic Horror.
1. Chapter 1

Prologue: The men in the watchtower

 _The end has come and gone, yet mankind knows no peace_

Some 40 million klicks out from the upper cloud layers of Saturn Fan Xiaoming lies dreaming, wide awake in his sarcophagus.

All his dreams are about flying. The Tempter's veil surrounds him, 15 000 parsecs to windward, on the opposite side of the galactic center, but also here and now. Towering molecular dust pillars, parsecs long, gold fading to bronze, russet and amber. Between them the gossamer silk of molecular hydrogen and helium, navy, indigo and jade, shifting to mauve and violet. Bird flocks taking flight and fairy castles and windblown sailing ships painted in brush-strokes of dust and light and twirling translucent magnetic fields like the skirts of a temple dancer.

With a shrug of his shoulders his wings unfurl, four square kilometers of perfectly reflective smart-matter membrane, catching the sun wind of the stellar nursery. A million stars litter the sky, a pirate's jeweled treasure trove spilled over black samite, rerouted nerves translating their radiation into gentle pin-pricks on his vacuum sealed skin.

Space is silent no more. The universe sings to him. Over the bas-rumble of the universal background radiation and the fog-horn sound of pulsars, the birth cries and death songs of far stars fill his auditory cortex with music.

The dreamer spreads his wings and dances.

Somewhere, half a galaxy and 20 centimeters away from the dreamer in the frontal lobes, force-grown high bandwidth neurons pour a torrent of data from his brain interface into his Occipital Lobe, bypassing the visual nerve.

Somewhere behind a thick plate of frosted glass the dreamer frolics in his wonderland, but here a sleepless watchman relentlessly hunts the data stream for the telltale signs prey, of signal in the noise.

The dark twins knows no exhaustion, no distractions, no sense of self, his lidless gaze never wavers. His senses reach across the solar system and beyond, from the hard gamma to the ELF radio band, from the mourning dirge of the memory beacons in high earth orbit to the backscattered whisper of a billion tight beam laser transmissions. From the Helium-III freighters launching towards Mars from the Löfstrom Loops in Saturn's upper cloud bands to the ten thousand fusion torch drive flames crisscrossing the inner system, he sees them all.

His sarcophagus surrounds him with a mother's warm embrace. It's micromachinery and his implants, nurse his body while his mind dreams and hunts. It's a spark of warmth and oxygen, amid the icy, airless darkness of the good ship CSCS " _Nostalgia for Infinity_ ". A squat armored cylinder, 109 meters from fusion torch nozzle to bow radar cupola, the Infinity has little in common with the space vehicles of bygone areas. No cabins, no commons, no bridge, only dense blocks of machinery stacked atop the fusion reactor and enormous fuel tanks, full of metastable helium-III ice, permeated by kilometers of winding, airless, lightless maintenance tunnels, most of them just large enough to admit a cyber-roach.

Time passes. The Infinity reaches aphelion and begins its long fall backwards towards Saturn, home and the end of its long futile watch. Their relief, the CSCS " _Lapsed Pacifist_ ", meets them one days travel outside of Phoebes orbit, fusion torch working intermittently while climbing out of Saturn's gravity well. At 500 000 kilometers, communication lasers are booted, handshakes established, transponder signatures confirmed, security tokens checked. A fountain of data begins to flow as sensor and maintenance logs are exchanged.

The watchman drinks it in with the same impassive, uncompromising hunger with which he has devoured Terabytes for months. A flag is thrown by one of the many dutiful little preprocessing engines, as it registers a faint radar echo exceeding the detection limit by about two standard deviations. This is in itself nothing unusual. It has happened a dozen times in the second before and will undoubtedly happen another dozen times in the next. A well-rehearsed routine of higher level analytical engines and filters awaits to sort out and eliminate the grains of interplanetary dust, the high energy charged particles triggering sensor artifacts and all the other causes of false positives, known to man. This one attracts ever more LAIs, circling like a hunting pack of hungry barracudas, as it is bumped upwards through ever higher levels of analysis. There is blood in the water. The illumination frequency is correct for a military radar reflection but the power signature of the return signal is all wrong for the measured range and the carrier wave frequencies are subtly Doppler-shifted the wrong way for it's apparent velocity vector.

Mircoseconds later, a moment of exultation as convergence is achieved. Neural nets bloom new connections, as underperforming LAIs are culled from the herd and the reward functions copies in a new generation, while the results are dumped into the short term memory of Fan and his crewmates, rudely ripped from their dreamlands to full wakefulness.

The Bogey is cloaked with adjustable meta materials. While the interloper adjust its shape to scatter radar signals away from the source, conservation of energy demands that the incoming pulse goes somewhere. The incoming signals correspond not to the radar search beam of the Infinity, whose output is reflected away from her sensors by the cloak, but to the radar pulses of her sister ship.

Fan Xiaoming knows a brief second of full awareness as Captain Bach's voice whispers in his auditory cortex: "Set condition 3 throughout the ship. Prepare for hard burn and release the data throttles."

"So you are just going to stick your big dataline in my interface and turn me on? Sorry bossman, but that's no way to treat a lady." Andrea Kramcynzski, Electronic Warfare Specialist and resident smart-ass.

"Luckily I'm only dealing with you and the rest of the clown circus …"

"Oi. Uncalled for!"

"… so that's not really a consideration I have to make, M. Kramcynzski. Rest assured I will give your insights all the careful consideration they deserve."

"We would get better results anyway if you would just authorize me to outsource some of neurological function related to tactile interactions and maybe the Bianchi-Demicheli feedback loop in the anterior insula to the extant infrastructure, it would decrease traffic on the system bus by 6% and markedly increase crew performance."

"That's a … very fancy way of saying: Can I run my yaoi porn virs on the targeting computer. Answer is still no, by the way."

"An army fails or stands on its morale, captain.

"The Circum-Saturnian Commenwealth knows a lost causes, when she sees it and she is not in the habit of wasting resources, citizien-soldier."

"You are going to dent my self-confidence, boss man."

"I just command a spaceship powered by the fire of stars with my mind, I'm not actually a magician. M. Fan, M. Kramcynzski is about to do permanent damage to my sanity. Where is my synchronity event?"

Fan rolls his eyes, or rather he would have if the motor function suppressors would have let him. "Truly a dire situation, Captain. We know you have not much left to spare in that respect. Brainwave patterns green across the board. Latency is dropping as per standard boot sequence…"

New intelligence is uploaded into their tactical short term memory caches. One of the analysis engines has backtracked the vector of the Boogey. It has spent the last 120 years first on a Hohmann Transfer Orbit, than caught in a highly elliptic orbit around Saturn. Most likely launch date is the 17 March 2119 with a two sigma of 37.9 days. Earthfall.

The conversation gutters and dies. Captain Bach's mindstate feels like a blade in his head, cold control with an edge of colder fear. "M. Fan. Synchronity event. Now. M. Elbert prepare missiles for tactical nuclear strike."

"Awaiting command authorization, Captain."

Fan Xiaoming thinks of burning cities and oceans the color of arterial blood. He thinks of the cold butchery at the quarantine lines, of corpses dancing on their pyres of red napalm, of endless refugee columns fleeing from something to somewhere. He thinks of ash on the wind.

Most of all he thinks of wind chimes playing and the quite squeak of badly oiled hinges as a door opens. There is nothing else there, though. The public healthcare psycho-surgeons cut those memories right out, cut the pain and the panic and the gut-wrenching fear, leaving only the paper-thin black and white of a bad action sim. If he tries hard enough he will remember the names of these people but it will have no emotional impact. No connection. Dust to dust. Ash to ash.

Discontinuity. The command codes have taken effect and all that is Fan Xiaoming, all he feels, knows, believes and fears melts like ice in the sun, as brain regions go dark, dropping of the network. All that remains are the mission directives and the force grown neural tumors metastasizing out of the visual cortex and their siren song of seek and kill. A firestorm of neural activity as brain temperatures spike and cooling implants work hard to suck the excess heat from the blood stream

Mercy sleeps tonight, empathy is press ganged into service as an intelligence officer, but murder? Murder is out and about and boy, it is going to be hot night in town today.

As bandwidth spikes and latency drops 24 minds fuse into one.

The Warmind wakes.


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 1: Out for a drink

How the end of the world began or Three Idiots walk into a bar

The grandly named City of Jade Towers hovers in the equatorial Helmholtz currents of the water cloud layers of Saturn, some 300 kilometers above crush depth. Like nearly all its brethren it is a Server City, thousands upon thousands of kilometers of optical computer racks, running the perverse simulacrums that the machine cultists of the outer system call uploads and hardly a living soul to see. It's primary exports are metallic hydrogen, metastable helium-III ice, complex carbon hydrogens and water (…) For travelers willing to brave the dangers of the outer system (please consult with both your security contract provider and your life insurance before making any travel plans) it still holds a measure of interest as a center of skydiving, wingsuiting, air sailing, aerial paintballing and half a hundred different extreme sports connected to the enormous spaces of the Saturnian Atmosphere.

Most of the "locals" prefer to simply upload into cyborgs designed to facilitate these sports. Several of the more extreme ones are simply impossible to Humans, who retain their natural body plane. We strongly advice against it, but we offer our premium subscribers (Link: Subscribe now! 25% off the first year.) a list of vetted bodyshops and clinics. Please be advised that independent of subscriber status this service is only available if you hold the copyright to your body or alternatively a level 4 license, according to the Martian Commercial Code. (…)

TravelWiki, Baedeker Galactica, 5th Edition, ©Mercury Media Holding Ltd; Waterfront 67; 13147 New Shanghai, Mars

"I can't get a connection."

"Oh, that's just fucking perfect. Taniguchi?"

"Nope."

"There are enough optical quantum computers on this oversized shoebox to run like half a million alphas but we can't get a wireless signal. Have you tried the wire?"

Kunikida shrugs and gestures to the corrido wall, where instead of maps and the Instellar Trip advisor LAI logo, the smart paint only provides a 404 message error.

Kyon is, one by one, carefully lowering the filters and firewalls protecting his neural interfaces, but no howling horde of dancing avatars clamoring for his attention, no snow-storm of advertisement pop-ups obscure his field of vison, no sudden unexplainable urges for food or sex or a new customized cleaning bot, only 49.99 ecu, 2 replacement fuel cells complementary.

"Unbelievable, even the commercials are down. Almighty Buddha, I implore you, bring down your horse cock of wrath and smite the unwashed barbarians."

"… that's … not quite how the prayer is supposed to go, Kyon."

"Conversely, I'm also not supposed to be stumble around in Bumfuck, Saturn, without Noosphere access. I don't suppose anyone remembered to download an imprint that actually included the travel wiki?"

"Well …"

"Doesn't count if you saved it to the cloud, Kunikida."

"… never mind then."

"I still got the station map in my cache, so we at least we will find the way." Taniguchi volunteers.

Kyon bites his lip.

On the one hand that's truthfully more than he can say for himself, so he is not actually in a position to criticize his friend.

On the other hand Taniguchi suggested this bar and he has been known to display a taste for watering holes that oscillate between odd and downright dangerous. He calls it, appreciation of the local culture, Kyon tends to think of it, as a particularly perverted masochism fetish.

On the third tentacle, Kyon has no real idea about the local geography, neglected to download even the usual map and tourist package into his neuro-interface and finds the idea of stumbling around the labyrinthine loading docks singularly unappealing.

In comparison to the sky cities on Venus or Lapis-Lazuli, Saturnian settlements tend to be primarily resource extraction stations and/or mainly be populated by uploads in their servers, for which they provide near ideal conditions: An endless supply of extremely cheap energy, using wind turbines, plenty of atmospherical carbon for the circuit printers and a bottomless heat sink for their computer cores.

Accordingly the interior design philosophy tends to the spartan, long on function and short on aesthetics; no spider-silk tents in all colors of the rainbows like the windblown sails of the largest treasure galleon masquerading as the flying Dutchman, suspended from vacuum spheres of hyperdiamond, no bridges of spun glass, no hanging gardens and no artificial waterfalls.

Inside the virs, where the uploads and the dreamers with high-bandwidth neural connections frolic, a server city will contain enough wonders, dreamscapes, personal paradises and hells to keep a legion of explorers busy for a dozen meat-space life-times. Outside the picture is much more utilitarian.

A gently curving corridor of foamed bioplastic, stained by condense water, over a carbon-fiber skeleton, grey on grey, lit by the harsh white lights of LED lamps, stretches before them, left and right dozen of arteries branch of the main high way, leading deeper into the warren of the loading docks.

"Whatever took out the net connection is very likely also fucking with public transport." _Kunikida_ is pointing to a frozen entoptic traffic sign.

"Cargo drones seem fine." Taniguchi observes, as half a dozen heavy haulers whoosh by them.

"The port runs of a different network." _Kunikida_ answers. "We might as well go to the damn bar. It might be some time before the repair drones get to it. I don't think it will be very high in their priority stack."

"Leaving the population of the station without net access, is low priority now?" Kyon asks, grumpily.

"It's probably only a few nodes on the topside. Anyway as the cargo is still running the network backbone is unaffected, so the uploads are ok. So at most the embodied bio population, that's what 4000 people? Less than one percent of total population."

"It's a server city, dude. Meatsacks are second priority."

"The emergency system still pings. Only in text mode, no LAIs, no interfaces, but … ah, here we are 3rd item from the top on the bulletin." A pulsing icon at the bottom of his field of view informs Kyon that a text message had loaded into the cache of his neural interface. "Three noosphere nodes of the net in the topside spaceport district due to macrophage infection, yadayadaya, areas affected, blabla, ETA reboot: 3 hours."

"Welp, might as well get a drink while we wait." Taniguchi opinions.

Haruhi leans against the corridor wall, twirling a strain of her around her finger. It's auburn today and her cat like smile tells Kyon, he will not win this battle.

Above them the far thunder of nuclear rocket motors lights the Saturnian night as a heavy freight shuttle lifts of from its landing pad.

Kyon sighs heavily. "Fiiine. But if I get blood on my new thermal jacket, _again_ , the refabbing comes out of your comp time budget, Taniguchi."

The bar, "The Jungle Gym" is located on the rim of the city, just of the outer concourse, whose great panorama windows showing an endless sea of Kelvin- Helmholtz instability cloud layers, achingly beautiful white silk ribbons, surrounding towering cloud castles, palaces and minarets, tapering down to the finest lace patterns of water ice, faintly lit by the pale ghost light of Saturn's rings and the positon lights of the city.

It takes his breath away every time he sees it. Kyon pauses, while his friends continue to the bar to get a table. Saturn's icy cold seeps through the triple isolation layers into the insufficiently heated concourse, making his breath mist, but the hardly feels it. A flick of his eye mouse adjusts the frequency range of his eyes, making the intricate magnetic fields of Saturn visible and filtering the positions lights from his view.

Origami-figures of transparent gossamer fold into each other as the magnetic fields sinuously twirl over the cloudscape.

50 kilometer high Raleigh-Taylor Instability Cloud Towers mushroom upwards, where fountains of liquid hydrogen rise from the depths of Saturn penetrating deep into the atmosphere, silver trees sheeting vortexes and ice crystals like cherry blossoms.

"Isn't it beautiful? All these mushroom clouds and stratocumuli, a bit like a silver and ice replica of Tokyo when you last saw it. Fewer fires, though."

Haruhi has stepped up next to him, leaning against the transparent keramit of the windows. Kyon touches a gloved hand against the window pane and pulls back with a hiss. Even triple glassed keramit with high vacuum isolation layers is no match against the bone deep chill of the saturnian atmosphere.

"Near extinction events are not my kind of aesthetics." He clamps his jaw shut. He answered by pure reflex and regrets his lack of control instantly.

"The birth pangs of something new. Living, dying. Forward, back. The intertwined double-helix of creation and destruction. Two sides of the same coin. Can't you hear it? Ever spinning. Thus we return to the void."

He turns his face away to the window, will not give her the satisfaction of a reaction.

The reflections Haruhi's eyes are dark and fathomless, when she smiles, small pin-pricks of light swimming in the blackness like far stars. Or something else entirely.

"You always were so stubborn, Kyon."

Her fingers brush his cheek, sending shivers down his spine. He draws his thermal jacket tighter around his form against the sudden cold creeping into his bones and quickens his step towards the warm lights of the bar.


	3. Chapter 3

Chapter 2: Concerned Citizens

 _In which ancient conspiracies and bar hoppers alike have to argue over the bill._

 _Good Evening Gentlepersons, tonight on MONITOR we will be discussing the upcoming Plurality vote of the Citizens Stipend Amendment and Infrastructure Investment Bill 2240, as well as the larger underlying controversy of the Reputation modified tax-system._

 _We are honored to have with us today Susilo Bambang Suparmanputra, Eidolon of the Gestalt mind Corning-Hypercube, Professor Torsten Bergmann, chair of emergent and complex system forecasting at Titan Autonomous University, Professor of Macroeconomics Chunjua Hujiang at Profunda University, Niels Sörensön, Psychohistoriasn at the parliamentarian A.I. Oracle service of the Three Wise Men and Andrej Vassilovitch Economic Spokesperson of the Automist Alliance Party._

 _Before we get started, please be aware of the public exo-memory link in the program description …_

 _(…)_

 _M. Hujiang: And I have to ask again, if the current economic output of the Commonwealth is insufficient to tackle all the projects we want to undertake, as it plainly is, why are we not trying harder to unlock the enormous, unused, economic potential in our midst?_

 _32% of the population is living of the citizens stipend, some with a hobby as side income, another 30 % or so do additional part time work .Our Oracles and Gestalt minds allow us better simulations and planning, our continued AI research better automatization. Still our GDP per capita is 7% lower than Mars because nearly 2/3 of our population is entirely unproductive._

 _M. Bergmann: There is a reason that most people rely on the citizens stipend and hobby work. Gene upgrades and Skillsofts none withstanding there is only so much you can do. The human brain is a hopelessly messy piece of soft-and hardware, entangled like a wool ball at a kitten party. You can yank on it to pull it in a certain direction, but never entirely without side-effects. Yank too hard and the whole mess is liable to unravel in your hands. Not everyone is cut out to be a psycho-surgeon._

 _M. Hujiang: This argument further removed from reality than a FTL drive. Mars' school system is largely privatized and profit driven. Exactly the lower educational levels experience far lower amounts of investment. They still manage to turn a profit._

 _M. Sörensön: On Mars they let you asphyxiate if you can't pay the oxygen subscription fees. Mars has shareholders and human resources, we have citizens. Little bit of a difference there._

 _M. Hujiang: Oh please. Spare me theatrics._

 _M. Bergmann: This is not theatrics. This is a fact. Mars uses far less A.I. than we do. Low skill work has been priced out of the market by LAIs entirely, here. Mars is in a better position, because they have a nascent biosphere, making the upkeep costs per capita lower and because they care less about the well-being of their low income people._

 _M. Hujiang: Leaving your social democratic prejudices aside, there is a certain amount of truth to this. I'm not suggesting that we imitate the Martian System, but we certainly could recover part of our losses by using citizens without for standard maintenance and manufacturing oversight purposes. I'm well aware that they would not be able to compete with AI on costs. Luckily we won't have to, the resources for the upkeep of the, ahhh, less productive members are a sunk cost anyway. The resources necessary for the creation of that many AI are not negligible and I would like to direct the attention of our viewers to the study of my institute on this very topic, which is available in the Exo-memory of this stream. If we implement the Somnambulistic rewrites to the central nervous system on a larger scale, this doesn't even need to impact quality of life negatively. The work will be done literally in their sleep._

 _M. Suparmanputra: Our colleague overstates the amount of savings considerably; after all we would still need to produce all the cyber-shells and manufacturing facilities. More importantly the modifications M. Hujiang speaks of will require extensive psycho-surgery, which is expert labor. The proposed brain modifications will only allow the execution of a fixed program, while the host-brain sleeps. The maximal complexity of the algorithm will in turn be limited by the computational platform on which it is running. No offence intended but the people in question were our best and brightest, they wouldn't live of the citizens stipend in the first place. It is entirely unclear if the return on the proposed investment is actually worth the opportunity cost._

 _(…)_

 _M. Vasssilovitch: And let me be clear on this point. The Voidrock Coalition joined the Commonwealth under the assumption that as long as we participated in the Economic Reputation and Tax system as arbitrated by the Three Wise Men, we would be free to improve on the half-hearted solidarity of the State inside our own Habitats as we saw fit. If this bargain no longer applies, other agreements will also have to be reexamined._

 _M. Hujiang: The Inner Habitats can run on pure Reputation Systems as long as they want. Go full on anarcho-communist, see if I care. If only you wouldn't need the tax money of the golden Axis._

 _(…)_

 _Discussion Panel by the Economic Faculty of the Titan Autonomous University and the Circum-Saturnian Broadcasting Services, held on the CSBS Politics Virtuality Channel._

The man known to some as Seven, is diving through darkness between worlds, drawing corkscrewing waves of probability around him like the fiery plasma tail of a shooting star.

Where 'might' collapses into 'is', the quantum foam of the probability wave front blooms a jungle of fractal possibility flowers, some fragile growths of alabaster and white jade, evaporating into showers of diamond dust and prismatic sprays of fairy lights as quickly as they condensed into these plane, others towering coral riffs of gold and mother of pearl, sprouting ever-changing ecologies of was/is/maybe.

Seven knows his garden well. He is a careful caretaker and his pruning shears are sharp, although he loves all his flowers. Today, though, he has eyes for only one blossom, a small chrome orchid with petals like razors.

Long ago/now/soon, it was/is/will be growing, a tree of thorns, a Yggdrasil of pain, it's roots extruding along the space and time-like dimensions, curling into the hidden places of the fifth, sixth and seventh dimensions, where the emergent properties of complex systems lead their own strange, shadow-lives.

Savage laughter reverberates unheard in the dark halls of dead and uncaring gods.

His Lady Entropy, she-who-waits-at-the-end-of-all-paths, the only Mistress this mindless universe acknowledges, smiles well pleased.

Nothings remains but the faint hiss of the sand in the hourglass.

The man is old, very old, one of the oldest surviving members of his species. Few things surprise him anymore, so he is very familiar with the general set-up, even if the props have changed.

In his youth, officially unofficial meetings such as these would have involved an anonymous conference room with locked doors, grey wall-to-wall carpeting and very bad coffee. Possibly and most frighteningly a PowerPoint(™) presentation.

These days, it's an encrypted vir, running on a heavily firewalled server. About 2/3 of the attendants are uploads, the rest mostly like him: cyborgs in survival tanks, their consciousness slowly spilling out of their oversized heads in a metallic halo of brain implants.

The Saturnian Commonwealth is a mixed direct/parliamentarian cyber-democracy with heavy use of psycho-historic forecasting, simulations and Oracle engines. All its deliberations are recorded and with very few exceptions, usually security relevant, immediately made available to the general public.

Nonetheless under the weather vane of vox populi and its elected representatives, the engine rooms are manned by public servants, who have to keep the ship of state on course, even in stormy weather.

This gathering has no name, even if it is sometimes referred to as the "Special Circumstance Committee" by its members, no official function and, is in fact, no different than any get together of private citizens, although those usually tend to contain fewer high ranking spooks and civil servants.

Nobody can accuse them of extravagance. The Vir is as simple as they come; a featureless white plane stretches into infinity under an equally featureless black sky. 17 black, numbered monoliths, one by three by nine, represent the attendants. The communication channels are relatively low bandwidth, limited to audio-equivalent sensory input, severely curtailing the possibility of mind-to-mind data transfer. The old man is torn between approval for the functional simplicity and annoyance at the underlying melodramatics. At least they have skipped the black robes this time, he thinks sourly.

Eleven speaks: "We confidently expect the Metallic Hydrogen, Water and Hydrocarbon exports to remain on the current growth trajectory. Venus is nearing the end of its terra forming process, but Mars is entering the critical phase and there a simply no price competitive sources, that can provide in the required mass numbers.

Helium III rates are stagnating. The Inner Planets are very conscious of our monopol and are taking pains to reduce it, so far with limited success. It is my understanding though that beamed power from inside Mercury's orbit is about to make real dent there.

On the other hand the market penetration on our skillsofts, dream-virs, narco-algorithms and psychosurgeries is less than we hoped for, but …"

"Eleven. We didn't come here for a lecture. The TLDR please?"

Eleven sighs, annoyed. "This is the TLDR, gentlemen. If you want the full version have a look at the files in your exo-memory. The trade links with the inner system are unravelling.

On the upside IP piracy will continue, of course, and we can cut down on paying the Planetary Consortium protection money. If there is less trade, we are less exposed to their commerce raiders. We hope that our expanding colonial holdings and new investment plan, which my department has prepared, will make up for the shortfall, so the economic losses are manageable.

Bottom line: New Shanghai and we have been polite to each other for the last 80 years because it was a symbiotic relationship. A bad marriage, maybe, resentful and co-dependent but a working relationship. Now the glue has started to crack. It's only a matter of time until the knives come out. "

Seven speaks up: "I think I can be of some assistance on this question. The new deep-dives from SYBIL are in. It is as we feared."

A file of considerable size is loaded in the communal exo-memory; the data set crystallizes in his short term memory with a barely perceptible moment of lag, as his personal security suit gives the data package the electronic equivalent of a cavity search.

"We have 25 years, 30, if we are lucky." Thirteen says.

That is a broadly accurate, if strongly simplified, summary, the old man's muse finds, when it flings a score of analyzing daemons at the data package, while he flicks through probability density matrixes and decision trees.

Seven clacks with his teeth. "Only, if we can keep the other stake-holders in the dark. These things tend to get messy and … unpredictable, if more than one Oracle-engine is in the mix. Interference."

Four speaks "We are still 10 to 15 years beyond the forecasting horizon of the best competition, civilian or foreign."

"So you hope." Six remarks acidly. "Meanwhile I'm sitting here, guarding our borders with a bunch of gun boats, good for nothing but pirate hunting."

The 3-dimensional surface plots, indicating the simulated emotional response matrix of his colleagues, stab angry carmine spikes into the aggression spectrum as tempers fray. The old man turns to his meta-cortex, to prune his aggression response.

"We will come to the funding questions in a moment, Six. For now we must all do what we can to keep this out of public consciousness for now. That will be your job Seventeen."

Seventeen is unimpressed. "How is that supposed to work? If we want the funding for the fleet expansion, we need the people to vote that into the budget, do we not? If there is not threat, who will do that? Mathematically optimized orgasms, a fancy new nervous system for the best designer narco-algorithms, a full immersion VR riddle quests … all just more fun than expensive and useless death machines."

Four agrees, "We will need a propaganda campaign. In time. If this graduates from fringe speculation to public debate item, before our pieces are in place, we are in trouble. Public opinion is a self-reinforcing feedback loops."

"Like a nuke." Six volunteers cheerfully.

"Yes, exactly, thank you. Gentlemen, may I remind you: No warships without funds, no funds without compromises. Eleven, if you would continue?"

"Thank you. My colleagues and I have prepared a new budget, which we think, is politically viable and allows us to push forward our agenda.

"First of all, we can safely abandon investment in further Löfstrom Loops on Saturn, although the running projects on Uranus should be completed, if only to keep the local communities happy. The demographics out there tend towards the anarcho-communist with Vietnamese and Slavic language groups dominating. These guys have a chip on their shoulder, so we will need to massage plenty of egos."

"Secondly we would like to increase the production of public computational resources until an upload on the citizens' stipend will be able to afford to run his virs at both beyond-human-perception-resolution and real time speed. This will make the server cities on Saturn and Titan happy and it will save costs on the long-term. Compared to embodied citizens on basic, we confidently expect savings of 9% per year and head."

Ten is skeptical: "More money for the golden axis? Neither the Twelve Commons nor the Inner Moons will like that."

Seventeen waves his objections away. "There is no sense in keeping the periphery happy and losing the center. The secessionists are getting traction in Nyhavn and Quebec. New Shanghai is doing all it can to fan the flames. People are tired of pouring and endless stream of resources into the poorer stations and getting nothing back but complaints. If we lose the goodwill of Titan, Lapis-Lazuli or Saturn the bottom falls out of the Commonwealth."

"The poorer habitats will be able to push more of their hard cases on the server cities and the prosperous cities will be able to limit their expenses, but the bioform heavy clades on Titan will want a bone, too. First and foremost, more domes. Public housing is getting too expensive. Also more funding for childcare and more gen-upgrade packages to be included in the public healthcare program."

Six is not happy. "If you want to push all that through, that will call into question not only the financing for the fleet expansion program, but also the traffic laser-grid for the inner Moons and the terra-forming timeline for Lapis-Lazuli."

Five chimes in: "I would like to remind my esteemed colleagues, that Force: Atmosphere is still owed a replacement for the Mantis attack plane. In the eighth year running, now. "

"The traffic-grid is a write-off. It will never recover its cost. Instead, expand the network mass-drivers and give every relevant station enough lasers for ablative breaking. Those can also double as asteroid and military defensive networks in a pinch."

"Oh please, the seeking software sucks, we both know it will …"

"So one software patch and we are good to go, making it still vastly superior to your alternative …"

"You damn well know that the inner moon habitats need the investment…"

Even Meta-cortexes will not work, if you do not use them. Juggling so many oversized egos colliding, even on a good day, is more art than science.

The old man is running out of patience. "Enough. We can either learn to like this package and the political capital it preserves or Weissman and the Better-Lives-Coalition _will_ press forward with their reform bill. SYBIL gives her a 62 % chance of success with a two sigma confidence interval of +/- 7 %. That's all there is to it. The laser-grid will have to go. Fourteen, the Terraforming effort is your forte."

Fourteen shrugs: "Lapis-Lazuli will stabilize on an asymptotic trajectory to 4.2 % oxygen content, well beneath the limiting oxygen concentration for hydrogen. It might take a few thousand years but we will get there. Meanwhile we can put up atmosphere converters in the sky cities. Leave the rest to the seeded air-plankton and the biosphere specialized Gestalt-minds."

"Lovely. That's the Greens pissed at us. Just racking up the friends, today, aren't we."

"Conserving resources, while maintaining a majority in the Althing will be a balancing act, we knew that." Four throws an exo-memory link into the vir, which sprouts an enormous oak-tree of golden light as a thicket of possibility paths explodes outward.

The seventeen monoliths hover in the darkness, while the tree grows around them, shedding fractal possibility flowers, fragile soap bubbles of Mandelbrot and Julia sets, shifting from indigo and aquamarine to carmine and purple.

The old men watches as branches wither and die, plunging down into darkness. World lines like bony, twisting fingers, scratching at oblivion. A few hundred threads of spun gold, woven into a tenuous tightrope, spanning the chasm into the future.

The Seventeen rotate around the bridge, as the old man drags his hand through the condensed waveforms, spilling maybe-worlds like fairy dust. All of them smell of blood and iron.

"The successful scenarios demand we keep Mars busy, until we can shift public opinion to something friendlier to our agenda."

"That's fine. We have friends there."

Ten is not impressed, "Barsoomist don't have the numbers or the infrastructure to be more than an annoyance. We need more."

Eight speaks up, "The Consortium Hypercorps do not trust each other further than a cling-film condom. Fa Jing and Solaris in particular are more paranoid than a dock-side whore on bad crack. It might be time for a bit of shit stirring. A few unfortunate car accidents … leave the details to me. We have specialists for that kind of thing."

"While we are getting to the dirty parts, we will need to do something about public opinion and that would be easier without certain members of the diet."

"Can't we just go with the good old bogeymen? Killer robots under you bed. Titans in your exo-memory cache?"

Thirteen snorts, wearily amused. "Tried that. Won't work. We have run a few simulations. The response matrix is downright lethargic. The public LAI counseling and psychosurgery program fucked us royally."

Ten is displeased with the implied criticism. "It also gave us happier, healthier citizens. Not to mention fewer guys inclined to hose down the Chinese chicken joint with a submachine gun after a bad day at work."

"Exactly my point. Stomping on mental illness and PTSD is fine and dandy until you need people with easy psychological triggers."

"If we can't rely on old atrocities, we will have to produce our own. Every lie needs a bit of truth in it to give it substance. We need a shift in public opinion and that means blood on blades. Something with children if you please. Nothing gets the public outrage juice flowing more freely than the tragic tale of little Timmy and the murder hobos. "

"Leave the little dears to me. My boys will set it right, snippity snap. I have ideas."

The old man feels his lips curl at the undisguised eagerness in Nine's voice, before his meta cortex response function locks it down.

This is the greater good. The smaller evil.

No time for clean hands or second thoughts.

"We will, of course, tailor our intervention for maximum effect and minimal aggregate bloodshed, Nine please coordinate with Four, we will need some reliable black bag research teams to run the simulations."

The meeting is winding down and the monoliths start winking out of existence as the members of Special Circumstance start to leave until only Seven and Nine linger.

That is rarely a good sign.

"Well?"

"There is activity around the Children."

The old man tenses.

"What kind of activity?"

"The seventh child has gotten himself nominated for the federal diet."

For the first time in nearly a quarter of a millennium the old man is lost for words.

"He … _what_? How was this allowed to happen?"

"Joke candidate. Some ridiculous live cast of a bar patron went viral and got him a minor following. Enough brainwave signatures to get him on the election roll. The public forecasting engines give him better than even odds tough "

"Fucking shit balls."

The old man feels the oncoming throb of a headache and is sorely tempted to just switch-off the corresponding brain regions, but he needs his full-wits about him.

"No need for panic. Joke candidates come and go. Even assuming he wins, any important votes come up, on average 70% of their supporters will simply temporarily reassign their votes, if their voting preferences do not match." Nine says.

The self-discipline of two hundred years allows the Old Man to keep a lid on his irritation.

"I'm the animal tamer of this fly circus, I know how liquid democracy works, thank you. I don't expect him to suddenly win a diet vote to declare war on Venus.

He is the seventh Child. He has drawn the attention of the things that go bump into the night. Not to mention the infection vector he represents."

Seven clacks his teeth, a wet sound like a mousetrap snapping a fragile little neck.

"A federal diet member has immunities and protections, that normal citizen do not. Uncomfortable questions would be raised if he were to suddenly disappear."

"Best to not let it get that far then." Nine says. "We will fling enough mud at him to keep him out of the Althing. We will crawl so far up the asses of everyone anywhere near this clusterfuck, we will be able to peck out through their tonsils.

If this was more than a freak accident of bad luck and worse taste, we will know."

Seven clacks his teeth again. "Once is an accident. Two is a coincidence. Three times is enemy action."

"A patrol of Force: Space stumbled over a cold sleep casket on a ballistic trajectory, way out in deep black, in the middle of the Norse group. The thing was running cold and dark, finding it was a one in a trillion chance. They nearly nuked it, but someone got control of their itchy trigger finger at the last moment."

"I'm not sure if Six just doesn't know yet, what fish his boys reeled in, or if he is playing his cards close to his chest, but do guess who was on board, Lorenz."

The old man has not much fear left in him after a quarter millennium of the worst of what humanity has to offer. Still, the cold chill of long forgotten ghosts runs down his back, when a photograph materializes in his exo-memory.

The meta-cortex allows it. Fear is what kept him alive for so long.

A cold-sleep sarcophagus with a sigil printed on top. A blood red fig leave, pockmarked by a century of interplanetary dust, a line of text printed beneath it.

 _God is in Heaven. All is right with the world._

For the first time in nearly a century, Lorenz Kiel smiles. It's not a pretty sight.

"Shinji Ikari. Monument to all my sins. Welcome home."

In the darkness of the outer system, where the sun grows faint and dim and cold, the Echo Cathedral swings in slow, sedate Lissajous orbits around the Sun-Saturn Lagrangian point L-5. Matryoshka spheres of Hyperdiamond, 1 kilometer in diameter, glimmer gently in the faint starlight. Slender flute-like columns plunge into the darkness, piercing the inner spheres, towards the center, where they conjoin in an alabaster egg, lit a faint orange by the eternal fire in the heart of the cathedral.

Whispers fill the dim caverns, as the prayer chants of the monk in the inner sanctum echo through the enormous halls, reflected and amplified, distorted and delayed, fleeting ghosts chasing fading shades. Every second a single name crystallizes from the echo song, eerily clear, as if the speaker stood right next to her.

She hovers along the diamond cliffs of the outer shell, softly brushing her hand over the columns of names carved into the walls, disappearing into the twilight high above and below her, before she kicks off from the wall, gently free falling towards the center.

Like clouds of fireflies, swarms of gently glowing zero-g candles, in transparent safety paper bubbles, drift through the soft air currents, as she slowly falls towards the inner sanctum.

Today it is a wizened Buddhist monk, leathery brown skin taut over brittle bones, floating in a lotus position in the dead center of the sphere, chanting the never-ending list of names, scrolling over the entoptic screens hovering in front of him. A holographic mandala of dead gods surrounds him, crosses and crescent moons and stars and dharma wheels and torii and aums.

She closes her eyes, breathes in tune with the Totentanz, adds her own names to the endless river of unquiet ghosts.

There is no record of her command in the Mustering Scrolls of Titan. There are no records of her assignments. There is no record even of her birth.

The knife in the dark. No whiff of gunpowder; no trail of blood.

But the dead, the ones she loved and the ones she hated, know her name.

This is the Echo Cathedral, where the keepers recite the ten billion names of god. All the sons of Adam, all the daughters of Eve, who lie unburied in the ruins of the halls of their fathers. Their whispers are caught by the microphones spread around the echo court, lasered outward to the memory beacons high above and below the elliptic, where they sing their mourning dirge outwards into the dark.

A flashing icon appears at the edge of her field of vision. The _Flying Carpet_ is ready for launch, her fuel tanks full, and her missile racks ready for war. There is work to be done.

Behind her the song of the lost continues, uninterrupted, as it has for a hundred years before and shall for a hundred years thereafter.

After all they say, as long as a man's name is still spoken, he is not truly dead.


End file.
